So, it's The Washington Post, which is admittedly left-leaning. That's why I encourage those of you who believe in voter fraud to read over the links provided, which I relinked here for you. I'll be interested to hear your rebuttal.

Voter ID laws are back in the news this week after a group of college students joined a lawsuit challenging North Carolina's new restrictive rules. And as Catherine Rampell pointed out earlier this week, it's not just ID laws - Republican state legislatures have been busy devising all manner of creative ways to make voting more difficult for traditionally Democratic-leaning groups.

All of these restrictive measures take their justification from a perceived need to prevent "voter fraud." But there is overwhelming scholarly and legal consensus that voter fraud is vanishingly rare, and in fact non-existent at the levels imagined by voter ID proponents. That hasn't stopped many Republican lawmakers from crying "fraud" every time they're faced with an unfavorable election outcome (see also: McDaniel, Chris).

For reference, a round-up of the latest research is below. Let me know in the comments if I missed anything.

Academic research

The Truth About Voter Fraud, by Justin Levitt of Loyola Law School. Levitt performed a wide-ranging analysis of alleged incidents of voter fraud across the U.S. "Usually, only a tiny portion of the claimed illegality is substantiated — and most of the remainder is either nothing more than speculation or has been conclusively debunked."

The Politics of Voter Fraud, by Lorraine Minnite of Columbia University. Minnite concludes that voter fraud is exceedingly rare, and that the few allegations in the record usually turn out to be something other than voter fraud: "a review of news stories over a recent two year period found that reports of voter fraud were most often limited to local races and individual acts and fell into three categories: unsubstantiated or false claims by the loser of a close race, mischief and administrative or voter error."

Fraudulent Votes, Voter Identification and the 2012 US General Election, by John Ahlquist and Kenneth R. Mayer of the University of Wisconsin, and Simon Jackman of Stanford. The authors conducted a survey experiment "to measure the prevalence of two speciﬁc types of voter fraud: repeat/fraudulent ballot casting and vote buying." Their conclusion: "The notion that voter impersonation is a widespread behavior is totally contradicted by these data."

Voter Identifications Laws, by Minnite again. "In 95 percent of so-called 'cemetery voting' alleged in the 2010 midterm election in South Carolina, human error accounts for nearly all of what the state's highest law enforcement official had informed the U.S. Department of Justice was fraud."

In 2011 a Wisconsin task force found sufficient evidence to charge 20 people with fraudulent voting in the 2008 elections. Most of these were felons who were ineligible to vote.

Kansas' secretary of state examined 84 million votes cast in 22 states to look for duplicate registrants. In the end 14 cases were referred for prosecution, representing 0.00000017 percent of the votes cast.

A 10-year 'death audit' in North Carolina turned up a grand total of 50 instances in which a vote may have been attributed to a deceased person, most likely due to errors made by precinct workers.
News investigations

The New York Timesexamined five years of Justice Department records and turned up only 26 convictions of fraud by individual voters. "Many of those charged by the Justice Department appear to have mistakenly filled out registration forms or misunderstood eligibility rules." And many of the cases were "linked to small vote-buying schemes in which candidates generally in sheriff’s or judge’s races paid voters for their support." Overall, the Times concluded that "the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections."

News 21, a student journalism project based at Arizona State University, analyzed 2,068 alleged fraud cases from 2000 to 2012 and found a total of 10 cases of alleged voter impersonation. They found that "while fraud has occurred, the rate is infinitesimal, and in-person voter impersonation on Election Day, which prompted 37 state legislatures to enact or consider tough voter ID laws, is virtually non-existent."

Court rulings

In striking down Wisconsin's voter ID law this spring, district judge Lynn Adelman wrote "The evidence at trial established that virtually no voter impersonation occurs in Wisconsin. The defendants could not point to a single instance of known voter impersonation occurring in Wisconsin at any time in the recent past."

Christopher Ingraham is a data journalist focusing primarily on issues of politics, policy and economics. He previously worked at the Brookings Institution and the Pew Research Center.

This is bull. W stole the election in 2000 and then he stole it again in 2004 by rigging the Diebold voting machines in Ohio. I know these things because liberals told me all about them when they lost.

This is bull. W stole the election in 2000 and then he stole it again in 2004 by rigging the Diebold voting machines in Ohio. I know these things because liberals told me all about them when they lost.

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Thanks, Trump for the civics lesson. We are learning so much about impeachment, the 25th Amendment, order of succession, nepotism, separation of powers, 1st Amendment, obstruction of justice, the emoluments clause, Logan Act, conflicts of interest, collusion, sanctions, oligarchs, money laundering and so much more.

As in "even though the system is broken, it probably doesn't influence the outcome of many elections though we can't really be sure since we don't have any way to accurately gauge it since the system is .. you know... broken."

Fact is, we don't have the foggiest clue of how much we don't know on this subject. The system is THAT full of holes.

This is like a city the size of Houston having only one traffic cop and then claiming speeding isn't an issue because they don't issue very many tickets for it.

There's no rigging Austin because polling data proves it. If polls were wildly wrong we could assume fraud but since they're not, we know our elections are extremely legit. Which is why it was funny watching Libs throw a tantrum over 2004 despite all the polls showing W was going to be re-elected.

Articles like this bug the living shit out of me. It's "wishful thinking" not any sort of real data based analysis. The other side is guilty of the same kind of crap when claiming unequivocally that there IS widespread fraud.

Here is what we know for a fact... we simply don't know how much fraud there is because we have no means of knowing. (I would GUESS that it isn't some sweeping conspiracy that is a major problem but that guess is solely based on how lazy the public is and how much easier it is to get "legitimate" votes through perfectly legal but shady means)